The Blood Debt: Books of the Cataclysm Two

by Sean Williams

  “Shut up, whiteskin. I'm not talking to you.” Pirelius didn't even glance at the albino.

  “Hop on out, little rabbit,” jeered Rattails. “Don't make him come in after you.”

  “What do you want?” Skender asked. “Why are you doing this to us?”

  “Why? Because we can.” Pirelius stepped into the cage entrance. “We're a law unto ourselves, here. Locals don't come to the Aad because they think it's haunted—and I suppose it is, in a manner of speaking. Haunted by us. The flyers say the air is bad, so even they stay away. What do you think, boy?” He sniffed. “Fresh enough for you in here?”

  “We're not doing anything to hurt you.”

  “Oh, no? Just by being here you hurt us. You'll betray our little secret—if it hasn't already been given away. That's what I want you to tell me, boy. Who sent you here, and why? Tell me, and I might forgive you for breaking Izzi's stick.”

  Pirelius took another step towards him and unwound a leather cord from his waist. Skender looked at Kemp, but there was nothing his old friend could do. Pirelius made sure to stay well out of range of the albino and his half of the stick.

  “I'm not bluffing, boy.” Pirelius's voice was low and dangerous. “Don't think I am. Your whiteskin neighbour is untouched only because I don't trust him. He's the biggest, and I don't intend to give him an opportunity to turn the tables. He's made it pretty clear what he'll do if he ever gets the chance. So he's going to stay nice and tight in that little box until someone else breaks and tells me the truth. It might as well be you, don't you think? Because if it's not, tonight's not going to end very well for you.”

  “I don't know what you're talking about,” Skender said. “There's no secret. There's nothing to tell.”

  “No?”

  The leather thong lashed out and caught Skender across the face. It happened almost too quickly for him to see it, much too fast for him to raise the stick in self-defence. The pain was so startling and so sudden that his hands flew to the spot and the stick dropped to the ground, forgotten.

  “You—” Skender flinched, and turned away to hide the tears. Pirelius didn't laugh, but the others did. Kemp was calling him, but all he could hear were the jeers and the cries to hit him again.

  Pirelius did, and this time the blow fell across his shoulders. It stung like acid and pushed him forward, into the bars separating him from the empty cage next door. He clutched at it and wished with all his heart that Tom had warned him not to go wandering off in the dark on his own. If he'd just stayed with Sal and waited for daylight—

  “What's it going to take?” Pirelius bent over him, his voice an outraged roar. “A broken arm? An eye poked out? I'll make sure you get it. And I will get what I want. I'm not an idiot, you know—although she might treat me like one. You're muscling in on my territory. Maybe you think my cut is too high. Maybe you think I'm greedy, getting fat down here on the front line. Well, look at me. Do I look fat to you? There are other ways to pay. You can tell her I said so—and if I have to kill a couple of you to deliver the message, I'll do it!”

  The lash struck in time with his words, beating the point home. Skender didn't try to defend himself, physically or verbally. It was clear that Pirelius had passed the point beyond which he could be turned back. There was nothing Skender could do but ride it out.

  While his body fell under the blows and curled into a ball in the corner of the cage, his mind did the same, in its own way. He huddled around himself and let the pain grow distant. Someone was crying; it might have been him, but he couldn't tell. The voices were as faint as starlight. He faded out completely for a moment.

  When he came to, the blows had stopped falling. He heard a banging of bars, a strange voice calling, and much milling about and confusion.

  “Keep away from it!” Pirelius cried to his underlings. “It's dangerous. You saw what it did to the man'kin!”

  “Yeah, but it can't hurt us, can it?”

  “We don't know that yet. We don't know what it'll do when it's not taken by surprise. Who knows what it's thought of for you poor fools!”

  Skender heard a general shuffling of feet as people backed away from whatever was making the commotion.

  “Put him in the cage next to it,” Pirelius ordered. “Unlock the door between them. Maybe that way we'll find out what else it can do.”

  Skender kicked out as a shadow fell across him. Strong hands gripped his arms and legs, hauled him out of the cage and across the room. The bruises on his back and shoulders burned like fire. The world spun dizzily around him.

  He fell to the ground again and a door clanged behind him.

  “Throw him the stick.” Pirelius laughed. “Fat lot of good it'll do him. Maybe he'll change his mind about talking when he sees what sort of company he'll have to keep in here.”

  Pirelius's mocking laugh echoed as he left the dungeon, followed by his cronies. Kemp called Skender's name over and over, but Skender didn't know how to answer. The banging gradually subsided. He heard the shuffling of feet nearby, the grate of metal against metal.

  He clutched at the ground beside him and found his half of the stick. He pulled it to his chest.

  “Who is wrong here, Galeus?” asked a very strange voice. “Have you done something to deserve this?”

  Skender's eyes opened and focused with difficulty on the Homunculus's face, just centimetres from his own.

  “I'll never tell you anything,” spat the wriggling, whippet-thin lookout in Kail's arms. “You're wasting your time!”

  Kail didn't say anything. He just shifted his grip on his captive's wrist and eased his weight forward to apply leverage to an already overstretched joint.

  The lookout gasped with pain and shook his head in defiance.

  Sal watched from the sidelines, unsure what to do. Kail had led him unerringly to where the scruffy lookout had been searching through a series of stablelike structures in a distant sector of the ruins. How the tracker had known he was there, Sal didn't know, and there hadn't been time to ask questions. The lookout didn't stand a chance; on top of possessing the advantage of surprise, Kail was his superior in every respect—height, weight, reach, and skill. The lookout had gone down without a sound.

  “Which way?” Kail repeated into the man's ear. The man's skull-hugging cap fell away, exposing a scalp covered in ugly scars. “Tell me or I'll wrench your arm off at the elbow.”

  The look of pain on the lookout's face was unbearable. Kail sounded absolutely willing to make good his threat, and there was no doubting his capability.

  “No—let go!” the lookout gasped. “I'll tell you!”

  “Smart fellow.” Kail eased off the pressure, but only barely. “Be quick about it.”

  The lookout sketched a route through the outer edges of the ruins to a natural crack in the stone wall of the Divide. At the bottom of the crack, four metres down, was a concealed entrance that led into the tunnel system belonging to the ancient city. There the inhabitants of the Aad lived, if the one Kail had captured was to be believed.

  “Who do you work for?” Kail pressed him.

  “Pirelius.”

  “Who does he work for?”

  “No one. Ah!” The lookout squirmed helplessly as Kail reapplied the pressure. “We trade!”

  “And rob as well, I presume.” The lookout winced, but nodded. “Some people came through here not long ago. Friends of ours. What happened to them? If they're dead, you're going to wish you were, too.” A frantic headshake. “Where are they? Be precise.”

  More instructions followed. Sal wished Skender was with them to remember the details. Their route would take them to a dungeon along various natural corridors and through a chamber the lookout called “the sink room.”

  “What's that?”

  But the lookout seemed to have crossed some sort of threshold where the fear of getting into trouble with Pirelius was worse than any threat Kail could make. He shook his head and wouldn't elaborate.

  “Doesn't matter,”
said Kail. “We've got all we need to know.” He changed his grip to apply pressure to the lookout's throat, and squeezed.

  “Wait,” said Sal.

  Kail's hard violet eyes looked up at him. So did the lookout's, wide and desperate.

  “We can't leave him here,” said the tracker, as though talking to a child. “He'll give us away at the first opportunity.”

  “But we can't just kill him!”

  “Why not? I'm sure the courtesy wouldn't be returned.”

  “I don't care about that. We're not like him—at least we're not supposed to be.”

  Kail squeezed tighter. His grin was feral. The lookout began to turn purple. Dirt-blackened fingers scrabbled for leverage, without success.

  “I mean it,” said Sal.

  “I know you do.” Kail winked. The lookout sagged, and he let go. “That'll slow him down for a while. And when he wakes up, he'll be glad to be alive. That's exactly how I want him to feel.”

  The tracker produced a length of twine from his pack and proceeded to tie the lookout's wrists and legs together, and gagged him so he couldn't call out.

  Sal watched impotently, feeling like the butt of a joke he didn't want to understand.

  Kail stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. “Now, I suggest we get going before he's missed. Any objections?”

  Sal shook his head. After briefly checking to make certain that the lookout's nose was unobstructed, he followed Kail into the first glimmer of dawn light.

  Skender's eyes were crossing and uncrossing, or so they felt. The Homunculus's face was in a state of constant flux. Its skull shrank and expanded like a blacksmith's bellows. Two eyes became four became three. He didn't know where to look.

  Who is wrong here, Galeus?

  He scrabbled shakily backwards, away from the strange creature. Had it been an ordinary person, it would have been crouched on all fours, bending over him. As it was, it appeared to have four legs and three arms. One hand reached out to him, then retracted.

  “What are you?” he asked it. “How—how do you know my heart-name?”

  “That's not important. Why were they beating you? Who are these people? What is this place?”

  Skender struggled to think. Only five people in the world knew that his true name was Galeus: his father, his mother, Sal and Shilly, and a girl he'd had a crush on two years earlier. The golem in the Haunted City had used it, but a golem wasn't human so it didn't count. There was only one other, and Skender wasn't sure if that counted as human or not.

  Your name is Galeus. We weren't part of this world, then.

  Through the chaos of the Homunculus's face, Skender made out confusion and indecision—and something else. The Homunculus radiated a sense of weariness so powerful that for a moment Skender forgot the throbbing bruises on his back, shoulders, and face.

  Certainty filled him, then. As crazy as it seemed, he had met this creature before.

  The one from the Void, the man'kin had told him, in the Divide.

  “You're the Oldest One,” he breathed. “I met you in the Void Beneath. What are you doing here?”

  The Homunculus shook its head in a blur of motion. Features smeared and overlapped with frightening rapidity. “The Void wipes everything clean. You can't possibly remember.”

  “I remember everything! You told me about the Cataclysm and the twins who caused it. One of them died, you said, and something happened. The world fell apart—or came back together—but you didn't remember which one of the twins you were. You—” He stopped, then. “Goddess. You're both of them!”

  “I—” The Homunculus quivered like someone having a fit. “We—we are lost. So much time has passed. Nothing is the same. What is this place? Who are these people?”

  Skender stared at it, finally seeing past the monstrosity to the strange truth beneath. The Homunculus was two people at once—two bodies in one, blending and merging in a constant flow of limbs and features. Sometimes the two bodies acted in accord, giving the appearance of just one person, albeit slightly blurry. Other times, there was no common ground, and they devolved into chaos.

  It—they—were trapped in the Homunculus.

  “Why are you here?” he asked. “Does this mean we're about to have another Cataclysm?”

  The Homunculus reared away, at war with itself, and fell, unable to coordinate all its limbs at once.

  As it thrashed on its back like a bug trying to turn over, Kemp called to Skender, his voice thick with worry. “What's happening in there? Are you hurt?”

  Skender managed to stand, although his back screamed with the effort. His cheek was swollen and dead to the touch. A mental numbness threatened to creep over him, as it had after the crash with Chu. He fought it with all his strength.

  “I don't know what's happening, Kemp. I don't know what to do.”

  “Just stay away from it. Keep out of reach and maybe it won't hurt you.”

  “I'm not worried about that.” He passed a hand across his face. “Something odd's going on, but I don't know what it is.”

  A low groan came from one of the other cages. Skender ran to the bars and peered through at his mother, who was stirring. He went to call to her, but stopped his tongue. Pirelius was bound to have someone listening in to see what happened with the Homunculus. The last thing Skender wanted to do was to give the bandit leader any extra information.

  I'm not an idiot, you know, Pirelius had said, although she might treat me like one.

  His mother went still again. He turned away. The distraction had given him an idea.

  Kemp didn't seem to know what the Homunculus was, but what if he really did? He would feign ignorance, just as Skender would try to keep secret from Pirelius that his mother was also one of the captive. If Kemp did know, then it was possible that the people the Homunculus had intended to rendezvous with were Skender's mother and her expedition, not Pirelius and his gang. That would solve several mysteries quite neatly, since Pirelius appeared to have captured the Homunculus, not conspired with it, and the Homunculus didn't even know who Pirelius was.

  When we come back, his mother had said, we'll have found something wonderful…

  For the life of him, though, Skender couldn't work out how to use the information to his advantage.

  The Homunculus stood quivering in the shadows, watching him silently. Its combined form had stabilised. Now Skender merely felt as if his eyeballs were vibrating every time he looked at it.

  “Why are you here?” he asked the twins. “What do you want?”

  “There's something we have to do,” the Homunculus said—and now that he was listening properly, Skender could hear that the odd discordant tone to the voice came from two voices speaking not quite at the same time. “But it's been so long. Our memories are only slowly returning.” One hand touched its chest, where Skender could faintly make out a strange mark. “We were protected. The Ogdoad marked us. The devachan couldn't erase us completely. We made it this far. Now it's all going to start again.”

  “What's going to start?”

  “Our life,” said the Homunculus. “Our lives, and perhaps our deaths. The future is flexible. This world-line is diverging even as we speak, so we have to hurry. We have to get out of here. Now!”

  The Homunculus took a step forward. Skender raised his hands in a placating gesture as the form before him began to disintegrate again.

  “Believe me,” he said, “I want to get out of here as badly as you do. But yelling's not going to help anyone. We have to think.”

  “I've had nothing to do but think,” said Kemp from his cage on the far side of the room, “and a fat lot of good that's done anyone.”

  “Yes, but you didn't have me with you, then.” Skender pushed the pain and exhaustion to one side and forced himself to concentrate. There had to be something they could do from within the cages, instead of wait—perhaps hopelessly—for rescue. The stick at his feet was patently useless against Pirelius, but that might not be his only weapon.


  He looked at the Homunculus. “You have no reason to trust me,” he whispered, “but I think we can work together to get us all out of here. Are you willing to give it a try?”

  The Homunculus nodded. “We don't have much choice.”

  “That's the way I see it.” Skender held out a hand. “Let's shake on it. No, just one of you,” he said when both right hands came up in rough synchrony.

  The arm split into two. “It won't work,” the twins protested. “We've tried.”

  Skender went to take the proffered hand. His fingers slid through the shadowy limb as though it wasn't even there.

  “Yes.” Skender felt relief as his hand retreated. “I was hoping that might happen.”

  Sal and Kail hurried through cramped tunnels, taking great care to pause at each intersection lest they stumble across someone who would sound the alarm. Thus far they hadn't seen a soul.

  Kail went first, lighting the way with a small pocket-mirror and directing Sal with hand signals. The tunnels were ancient and dirty: many of them had flexed and split with the shifting stone around them, forming odd intersections and dead ends where none had obviously been intended. Sal saw evidence that people had been using the tunnels for a long time in the form of dark patches on the walls where hands had pressed for balance, graffiti both proud and profane, and rubbish. The stink of human occupation became steadily stronger, until Sal quite lost the musky scent of the tracker ahead of him.

  Twice Kail ducked his head too late to avoid banging it on collapsed ceilings and unexpected lintels. His step was surprisingly light, given his size. He cursed just once, when a stone slipped under his foot and his knee caught a sharp outcrop. Sal, the smaller and clumsier of the two, had to frequently swallow gasps of pain. He could see why the tortuous route was kept only for emergency exits, not everyday traffic.

  As they wound deeper into the bedrock, Sal noticed that his sense of the Change was becoming increasingly distant. The last shreds of his connection to the living flows of the world were being muffled.

  “Can you feel it?” he asked Kail.

  The tracker nodded. “We're coming closer to the heart of the Change-sink.”